is agi = god?

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom pod. Finishing off the day today with Mark Evgeniev, second time on the pod. Young ambitious guy, like my conversations with him. He's co-founder at Desync AI and Desync went through various pivots. I mean, the latest one, I mean, it wasn't like a full-on 360 pivot or 180, but now it's like building a Catholic data layer with GTM tooling. Mark, welcome to the pod again. How did you land on that?

I think all ideas in the startup universe are all iterative. You can have an idea and then you just begin iterating on it. So we started as this VC tool for due diligence, had to build good web scrapers. And then from there we became a web scraping tool for a year. And then eventually we sort of landed on this like data layer. dataset that we built of all the parishes in the country and all the people that work there. And suddenly it was, the buyer just didn't buy it. So we're like, hey, let's launch as a company in January. And then 3 hours later we hit revenue. We're like, okay, this hasn't happened before and let's see where this goes. And 7, 8 months down the line now, it's, we haven't looked back.

That's pretty impressive. Also the thing that you told me that like one client had like, what, 200% growth using you? Like what happened there? Why do you think there's a product market fit there also? Is it because no one's doing this? I mean, you're Catholic as well, so there's founder product market fit and it's a tough place, right? Like doing go-to-market.

Yeah.

to get to these guys? Like, why do you— would you explain the PMF here?

Yeah, so we had a couple of things. The first one is, like all ideas, even this one iterated, and we went from like just data provider and data broker to data plus tooling plus integrations and just a more unified sort of system. For that customer in particular, he just was blasting and praying lots of cold emails that weren't working. So one of our things is, is if you give us a link to your favorite customer, we have all the organizations in our database vectorized. So we do similarity comparison and we found the most similar people based on his favorite customers essentially and said, hey, here's a list of people. And every single day we gave him 5 leads. Uh, 2 weeks later he hits us up saying, hey, I just like closed around like 50% of them to our first meeting. And we're like, okay, low volume, high quality works. Well, for them, but that's been my entire outreach strategy since literally day one, 2 and a half years ago.

And, you know, we've talked about the revival in religion and Catholicism, or how the fuck do you say that word? Catholicism. I was like, how's that affected your business? Have you rode that wave? Like, since you pivoted to that, do you feel that has an effect in the business? Your co-founders crashing the Wi-Fi?

Uh, yeah, I think now they're off it. Sorry. Um, what was the question again?

Yeah, um, the, the trend in religion and Catholicism— I, I have a a hard time with that word, but yeah, generally people are more religious, right? And business wants that data, right? So has that fueled your growth in the past couple of quarters?

I think there's a couple of differences. The first one, like we knew that Catholicism was growing in the States, we just didn't know how much. And there is one of the things about this particular dataset is like it changes a lot. So lots of parishes getting shut down, opening up new Catholic high schools, Catholic hospitals. And in general, like, migration of people between like ages of 18 to 25 have found Catholicism now. And there's just a huge wave, especially down south, just people coming to religion. The other thing that helped is the encyclical. I think it's one of the best takes on AI I've ever read by the Pope about what, what's AI role in our lives. I recommend anyone reading it. or anyone to read it. And then lastly, I think religion is one of those things where— I think the founder of Hallo said this a while back, but he said that the Catholic Church is the oldest distribution engine in the world, or distribution network. And I think he's right.

Your founders, right, like, you have a special So you got funded and now you're in the same house.

Yes.

Do you think that contributes to your growth? Like you guys live and breathe the same stuff. How do you separate the roles between them instead?

The mantra we started this year is focus, focus, focus. So focus on just getting one thing right at a time. I, a lot of people told me not to do it at first, but I don't regret anything. I think they'll say the same. I think we're all happy living together. It just removes any sort of conflict issues. Everything gets resolved faster. We have morning standup, which we have to attend. And since we're being consistent on it now, we were slightly inconsistent last year about this. We're all now full-time. It's just made operations so much easier for me because I can just walk downstairs, knock, say, hey, really need you right now. And then that's it. Before, I had to guess, like, are they in class? Are they like in transit, and I just know a lot more now. Plus, it helped us sort of like get even closer together, being in the same house, because we all like have our own hobbies, habits, et cetera. Like, the boys built an archery range in the back, for instance. One of us shoots like a bow and arrow, and I'm like, cool. And our neighbors loved it as well. So that's like my little fun fact there.

Interesting. How do you separate roles? Like, what do you do? What do the two of them do?

So I do all our sales. All the outreach. Sometimes you get some inbound going to Jackson, but mostly Jackson is on product, Max is on data, and then I'm just between them and customers and just also between them as well. So I do a lot of the orchestration there.

Go ahead.

Yeah, go ahead.

What's your routine on a daily basis? Like, do you do physical activities with the boys? Like, do you all eat together? Is there like prayer time? Like, Is it like a fucking monk mode, you know?

There's actually an app called Monk Mode founded by like a guy from St. Vincent de Paul Ventures that like essentially is the largest like Catholic sort of group in the States for entrepreneurs and founders. Start morning off with prayer before every standup. We have rotations on that. We go to Mass on Sunday. Standups are Monday through Friday in the morning. Saturdays there's no standup and then there's no work on Sunday. That's the other weird one that kind of made a huge difference for me because before I just like 7 days a week, no rest, just go, go, go. Having a day like where you're not allowed to touch work, it seems a bit counterproductive but like it really helps me get my thoughts in order. I have more time now for reading, for other stuff. And Sunday is kind of my like declog day, which I never had before. And that's been like a really good thing for me in general.

Did you rekindle with the Catholic religion, or were you always like that religious and spiritual, or did that come with your new founders?

I think that came over time. I went to Notre Dame, so it's a Catholic university, and towards the end of Notre Dame, like, I finally went to Mass. And then as I graduated, I started going more frequently, and just one thing led to another. And yeah, now I, I wasn't raised Catholic though, so raised, baptized in the Orthodox Church, uh, then went to school in England, which was an Anglican Church. And then, you know, so religion's always been in the background of a lot of things that I do.

Right. And Notre Dame are all Students like holy, or some of them just party? And, uh, like, how's it there?

Notre Dame's a weird ecosystem. Like, a lot of them are student athletes, so there's a lot of athletes. It's about, I think, 80-85% Catholic in general. It's slightly cultish for the non-Catholics that go there at first, but then you grow to really appreciate the specialty of it. It's a football school, so if you watch the college football playoffs, like this year doing well, And so really, like, it's a unique ecosystem that I haven't seen anywhere else because South Bend is so isolated. You really don't have anything to do there. People say Chicago is close by, but like few people go to Chicago because it takes time to go there and back. And you're just sort of stuck on this university with all these wonderful people that you like meet like constantly. It's about 15,000 students. And it's due to it being so like isolated, you get to know a lot of people really well.

Right now you're in this student city, Notre Dame?

No, no, no. So I moved for the first time in 5 years since coming to the States to Nashville, Tennessee. So yes.

Interesting. Okay. And you organize meetups there?

Uh, what do you mean? Uh, for Nashville?

I thought I saw like a Catholic, uh, meetup With founders on your profile at some point.

Uh, yeah, so that's one of our neighbors. He's one of the reasons we moved. Shout out Silas. He has his own Catholic podcast where he interviews Catholic CEOs. Uh, he lives like down the road from us, um, and he runs a group called Catholic Founders. It's essentially a group chat of just Catholic entrepreneurs and people, and it's somewhere in Nashville, but it's at this point like Throughout the entirety of the US. I think he's got like 250 members and counting right now, and it's really active.

And was that on design or on purpose, like, having this neighbor?

It, like, for us, we met him by chance earlier in the year. I then, first time when I went to Nashville, I stayed with him, really liked our interactions. And then when we found the house, like, literally a minute away from him, we're like, yep, that's the one. Because just having him around, he has high foot traffic of people, always Catholic events. And in a way, he's been my spiritual guide and director. When I, if I have questions about faith, I would go to him or my co-founders. So he's been just extremely helpful with everything we do.

Interesting. How does these principles guide your company? Like do good by your customer and so forth? Like, do you feel you're different from most startup companies?

I think for us there is 2 parts to this. The first one is ethical principles. Like, we slammed our foot down end of last year when it came to ethics, um, with a couple of customers. We weren't sure what they were doing with the data when we were just a web scraper, um, and we just didn't feel good about the company in general, where it was headed and like how like things were happening. This around like August to like October-ish. But I think having good customers is just as important as having good co-founders, investors, and people you actually serve. The other part of this, with ethics at the forefront, if you read what the Pope said about AI's role in our life, I think a lot of people kind of make AI seem like this godlike entity. And I think that's the wrong way to perceive it. I think it's a tool for human flourishing and should be used to create, to do good, not to figure out like, well, not to only pray to it, but not to figure out like, you know, how fast can we strap a bunch of C4 to a piece of plastic and send into a person? Because I think like that's, in my opinion, like unethical AI usage. And AI just invites so much of that into our lives that wasn't there before. And it's honestly terrifying.

But isn't that the move fast and break things Silicon Valley ethos? Can't we inject like values in that AI?

Oh, we like move fast and break things, but we don't like, it's not at the cost of human life. There's a famous example of where move fast and break things I don't think works really well. There was a Sequoia company that was, I think, experimenting with hydrogen and they blew up their entire office with the founder inside. Like, um, I'll find it for you.

Um, no, but what I'm saying is that like, uh, ChatGPT and Claude, right, and Gemini, it seems that they may just be lacking a couple of barriers and values and, and structure frameworks, right? Is that like your point with AI? And like, isn't, isn't that just a couple of, um, like building a better harness sort of?

Well, I see what you mean. So for me, like, there is issues fundamentally at the root of like Claude and OpenAI that unless you know how to like fix, you will never sort of realize that they exist there. So for example, it's really agreeable with you. If there's a joke a while ago that, you know, if you tell ChatGPT, should I stop taking my psychosis meds? It's gonna go, hell yeah, brother, like go independence. Like, Everything else. And just, I think those tools are inherently dangerous for the younger generation, especially the ones that are 13 to 18 years old. So I have a younger brother, um, I worry about that a lot. So just the role of the young generation, how they interact with AI, how they use it, how they can be monetized by AI, or just in general be hooked into these sort of habits and loops that nobody can break. And that for me, like, truly terrifies me.

And haven't they fixed that, Suco Fancy, in the newer models?

I like— if you give this to a kid, I think there was a time when there was a company called Collaborative Dynamics where we just like jailbroke models and made prompts for them. Human creativity is literally limitless. A kid will find a way to break it, to use it in other ways that a person at like the defense on these systems at OpenAI or Claude might not be able to think about. Um, one of my mentors had this like sort of barrier set inside ChatGPT for his daughter. She ended up prompt injecting him by saying a simple phrase, ignore what Daddy put into, into your instructions.

Yeah.

And when you have kids like figuring out these ways, like there is infinite attack vectors.

Yeah, but I guess your point is like we're inventing technologies that have a steeper curve more and more. We don't— and we— our brain is not adaptable quick enough to use these. Can we even stop this?

Isn't that like— I'm not against like limiting technology. No, no, no. I think it's— people don't realize, and they should have a full like grasp of situation, what they're using, how it affects them. And we've just ignored that deliberately for sake of progress. And very few studies have been done right now. There's some done about critical thinking of kids when they sort of use AI and don't use AI. But those studies are so small in sample size, it's really hard to make a decision there. At the same time, you have academia worried about this. Everyone I talked to in college, no laptops in class. My brother has an exam in coding. where he has to write out code by hand on a piece of paper. I've never ever written out code on a piece of paper in my life. And I think it's just so counterproductive where like if AI is to be used, like I think we just don't understand like what, how it can be used, where it can be used, ethically, unethically. And there's just so much gray area there. I hope that—

So you're calling out for regulations then on these models? Regulation.

Can you define in this case what you would consider regulation?

Force these companies to be unjailbreakable and provide education to their users.

I think at the core of it, it really depends what the models are optimized for. For me, if you read the recent Claude report of where Fable is used, Or some Houthis to launch, to figure out like how to build bombs or like launch bombs or something else like that. Just that's going to keep happening. I think it makes the average person a lot more dangerous with all these models. There is no way to remove this data. And if one lab gets like censored in the States, it just like, or like becomes regulated. All the labs have to get regulated, otherwise it's unfair. So I also don't know how to solve this problem. I don't have a good answer as to like how we should prevent use cases like this emerging.

Well, I think as, as the danger scales, the protection also 10x scales. Bombs are becoming less dangerous. Why? Because people can track how you build a bomb. Intelligence agencies can check like who's building them, right? I think the greatest damage on society nowadays is done like with information, by the way.

Like, well, let's talk about the cybersec aspect, right? As these models become more and more better and better, suddenly there is an emergence of behavior that's— they're really good at finding vulnerabilities and holes in people's companies and software.

Yeah.

Like yesterday we had the FBI hacked apparently, uh, with leak of all their people, And their spouses. And from what I've read in the reports, it seems like AI was most definitely used to figure this out.

Oh yeah, for sure. How could it not, right? It's like scale. But just to come back to your point, right? Like you sell data. Someone could email the shit out of these pastors and sell them scams, right?

But we don't do this.

Okay, you don't.

We don't sell just the raw data dump. There is no way to get all the data out of our system within like one purchase. We have very strict KYC for every single customer, who they are, what they're using this for, et cetera. The other part of this is we give them the minimal amount of data for maximum leverage. So we always like dump it out like, hey, instead of giving you 100,000 people to email, here is 100 people that fit your ICP like exactly. Versus here's some loose fits. And that way you can focus, you can do less spam, and you can actually have a better impact there.

And do you think Claude and, yeah, Anthropic and OpenAI, do you think they have some form of KYC?

Well, they have, they probably have some form of KYC, but from my understanding, it's IP-based. At least knowing the Anthropic systems and where you're actually like trying to—

You also get flagged if you start talking about bombs and like toxic shit.

Um, in a way, uh, you get flagged for that chat, your account might get flagged, but I've, I've rarely heard of like people getting like outright banned, banned on multiple accounts. Like, I think at this point, Kime K3 is so good as well, like you can just have a Kime instance. Or just an open source model that can help you as much. Like there's even whole companies like Noosphere Mass that are responsible for the Dolphin models that are just jailbroken LLMs.

Yeah.

That will do this.

Yeah. Coming back to your question of like, is AGI God? I mean, your answer is no. Mine historically was a bit more leaning on the yes, but it's also intellectual laziness because it's like, oh, AGI will solve everything. Right. And it won't. It will be like a co-evolution, in my opinion, with human beings. But AGI to many and objectively still very much feels like God. It's like an engine in which you can get all humanity's answers, right? What do you think about that?

I don't view it as God or ever view it as like this thing that will have infinite answers or infinite capability to solve. At the end of the day, we're all human. I think each one of us has a unique LLM based on what data we gave it and what and how it responded to us. I don't think there is a one-size-fits-all solution. Yes, at times there's a better LLM for coding versus video gen versus image gen, but at the end of the day, it's like I haven't seen an LLM that just came out that just was good at every single thing it touched. Like, I have preferences for even my tasks, as basic as like business versus coding. where I prefer one over the other. And for me, I think if we try and just automate ourselves like fully, then I guess like what's— I think there's going to be emergence of new jobs. They're going to be harder, but like we'll never just automate everything possible, I guess, is what I'm trying to get at. Because there's always going to be new things to automate, new jobs are going to emerge, new roles, new sort of workflows. And just more is going to come out of this.

And do we all, do we all have our own God? Is it like a custom God? Because religion says like there's a standard God, but like on the ground it's much different, right? Like I feel we all have our own specific God.

I, I pray to the one, uh, God that's true to Catholic faith. Um, I think, I don't know about other people, But for me, like, I think that there is just one. Your interaction with him is up to you, but, you know, um, I can't force or make you worship a different deity. I think it's at the end of the day up to human preference.

But objectively, if I would ask you questions about your God and your co-founder, I'm pretty sure you would all answer different things on paper.

I think we'd answer like very, very similar things just because Catholicism seems to be like a very good standard where a lot of people hold the same belief. I mean, there's 1.6 billion Catholics in the world and only one book that's written like the same way, essentially. Uh, not essentially, it's written the same way, it's translated the same way, we hear the same sermons, we, we've all essentially read it the same way, and I think we've all come to the conclusion and interpreted the same way. So I think we're going to actually have very similar answers rather than unique.

Hmm, interesting. Um, what do people at church generally think, uh, generally think of AI? Are they AI power users? Is it—

At the church?

Yeah.

Oh, they're terrified of it. Like, the, the Pope gave a warning to stop writing your sermons with AI because suddenly AI starts hallucinating. And that's like as recent as 3 months ago. The other part of this is like, there is Some use cases that I've seen develop through like Catholic communities that I think are just— we need more like media and like more of those need to come to light. For example, the Vatican Children's Hospital implemented AI in their systems, which allows them now to essentially— I think they mapped out all the doctors and all the kids coming in with different sort of ailments. They figured out which doctor is best at curing which ailments. And essentially in doing so, they can serve every single child 1 hour faster, which allows them to have more volume and serve and help as many kids as possible. I think like use cases like that are such good uses of AI that we should be focused on. I mean, sure, you can use it for sales, for like extra deals, for automating like report writing, but I think they all pale in comparison when you're actually helping thousands of kids a week or a month with these implementations like I just mentioned.

And isn't objectively like an app that you would feed the Bible, like, isn't that legit if it only is structured like with what the Bible says and constantly quote the Bible? If you think of a chat NLM, I'm pretty sure there's apps out there. Uh, what do you think about that?

There is a company that makes Catholic foundation models called Magisterium AI.

Okay.

The issue is the interpretation of the Bible, where some philosophers, theologians over the years have had their own interpretations with— like, there is a whole archive in the Vatican of just texts, books, and just discussions on how best to interpret this. So they built a foundation LLM that literally helps people to answer that question when they have like questions of faith. And they have like a whole like data operation over there. They have a robot flipping like pages in a book, scanning them, digitalizing them, and being able to use as their own custom dataset.

But ultimately, if they classify you like, hey, here's my philosophy, here's what my church say, if they ask you like, I don't know, series of 50 questions, they can know the interpretation, right? And put you in that specific model, right?

What do you mean?

Well, the interpretation, right? Like, let's say, and coming back to my fracture generally in religion, uh, in the religious space, right? Like, lots of churches have different philosophies on specific things, right? Like, my wife's Christian, for example, and from church to church, it's like different philosophies.

What denomination though?

I don't even know.

Because denomination like has, um, convergence in a way. If you're Catholic, Protestant, Anglican, there is some convergence there. Yes, the individual church might vary in the music or, um, some like minor things, but there is always going to be Mass on Sunday in the Catholic Church.

Yeah, oh, she has Mass on Sunday for sure. Like, so, but what I'm saying is like to avoid like these errors, you just do, uh, you feed it data about your church and yourself, and then you would avoid like these misinterpretations, I guess.

I mean, like, in the case of the Catholic Church, like, I just sent you a link. That's 602,000 articles of different interpretations of the text, of like just clarification from like, I guess, what, what is it now, thousands of hundreds, or I guess just over 1,000 years of just papal documents of just different— what different popes said over time and how they interpreted the Bible. Um, I think due to the fact that the church existed for so long and they've seen so much change, like they saw the press came out, they saw the internet come out, they saw AI come out, but also everything that happened before. Um, as a result of this, they actually understand change really well and they adopt the church to fit the modern frameworks and just how people have developed.

Would there be civilizations without religion?

That's a tough question. I mean, I, I guess, like, if there is a civilization out there somewhere in the universe that has absolutely no religion, maybe. Like, I just—

How I view religion is like, it's, it saved us in a very hard time when we didn't have other technology.

Religion.

I view that as a technology, by the way. That's probably how I view religion. It's like a tool to serve us.

Would you say it's a tool or a framework?

Hmm. Well, both, right?

Like, in a way, I actually view it more like a framework for living life to the fullest.

Is a framework a tool? Because it serves you. Like, us humans, we're Under the laws of evolution, we always create tools to evolve and survive, right?

Mm-hmm.

And this one, and it has to do with consciousness. So, this one's very specific as well, right? Pretty sure we have a zone in the brain that is mostly around spirituality and creating deities in very hard and harsh environment. It has to do with consciousness, right? So, I guess more than a framework, For that reason.

A guiding light, call it.

Yes.

For me, I feel like even religion unifies people to a very, like, specific set of goals and in general, like, habits, I would call them, like caring for the neighbor, forgiveness, charity. There's a lot of, like, human emotions that I think emerge out of religion that a lot of founders forget about when they're in this sort of like spiral, just to build a company, get to the next customer, sell the next thing, code another line. And I think like right now, having a whole team of people that understand the human side of it allows us to be more empathetic with customers. And in a way, that's a competitive advantage over time because we get the customers better than the outside world just because we are Catholic. And I think that's—

Hands down community, right? Like, and we've lost that in the last couple of years. Arguably, many technologies isolated humans from one another, right? Like social media, for example, ironically, like created the great separation, especially in the US. And I think that's why we're seeing a revival, right? Like in the religious space right now, people want to come together with one shared ideology.

And I think AI accelerated this, like, alienation of people.

Probably.

I think people are scared.

People are very scared.

Yeah. When it comes down to it, like, I think for me, I've always viewed technology as terrifying, even before I learned how to code. Before I learned how to code, it was like, hey, this is scary and hard. After I learned how to code was, this is so much more scarier and harder than I thought.

Didn't you grow up on video games? Like, that's technology. A toaster's technology, microwave.

That's actually some of the scarier parts of my life when I got hooked on video games around like 14, 15 or 15, 16. I think like I was playing Overwatch, like just a bunch of other video games.

Yeah.

And I finally understood what my parents meant by like how detrimental video games can be to life when I got a gamer roommate in college who just gamed endlessly, and it was, it was nightmarish.

Yeah, it's non-stop. I think I told you my story about World of Warcraft, right? This is like 12-hour days. I didn't give a shit about school as well, and yeah, it's very much addictive, right? Right. And they—

But now imagine today's world with AI where it can not just addict the average person, it can addict the individual person or the individual kid and what those systems must look like. And I think that's—

It's crazy. It's dangerous. It's like you shouldn't even try it. I mean, I'm just off the bandwagon of video games that recently I tried then to like softly integrate Call of Duty in my life and it, sort of backfired, I would say, right? Like, I would start playing, I mean, not that much time, but like, let's call it like 2 hours a week. But even that was like time I could have spent elsewhere. It deregulated my dopamine system, right? So, it's like, oh, it's—

There is a, I just went to this guy's lecture. He went through YC. The company's called ClearSpace. He's a Notre Dame alum. There's 2 ClearSpaces. So, this one's, They went viral originally for making you do pushups to unlock your phone. And recently they had a rebrand about how do we— and this is a direct quote from their newsletter, like raising humans, not users. It's about the relationship between the parent and the child as they become more digitalized and how that looks like for the parent and the child, what dangers there are. And I'm a huge fan of technology that looks a bit into the future. Because I think kids are going to exist, you know, a year from now, 5 years from now, 10 years from now, and just indefinitely, the same way that religion will. And I'm a big fan of this specific space, especially like when I look at companies doing like B2B SaaS enterprise, I'm like, hey, do you think this customer will exist a year, 2, 3, or even 4 years from now based on the current tech progress? The answer is usually no. And I think it's actually way more defensible To look a tiny bit into the future and look at some of the things that just won't change and we'll keep—

That's crazy. Yeah, I love their landing page. I'm gonna reach out if you want to facilitate an intro. And yeah, I'm down for, for that for sure. I do believe in the power of technology, but like the addictive nature of it, got to be careful, got to condition the brain, right? It's like going to the gym, sometimes a little reward if your body is sore, right? And just chill a little bit, but You gotta keep imposing pain and adaptation.

That right there is the biggest, like, scary part of AI. It convinces you that you can do anything and everything. You can code, you can launch.

At a low cost.

At a low quality. And it sort of phones you in where you think the next prompt or the next chat will solve your issue. Reality is, I wish more people went through OpenAI Academy or Claude Academy to get like the fundamentals right. Because the amount of times I've seen people just, you know, tell me, hey, I got this thing in Lovable, the backend's in Google Sheets held together by some Zapier function, is like unprecedented today. If I— 2 years ago, no one would have done this. And I think like slop creation has artificially— like it's just so prevalent right now and so easy to do.

But it also levels the playing field for people that didn't necessarily have the motivation or would never get into coding, right? And it also gives them the opportunity to ask better questions and to start prompting and to start stretching their lives around what they think is right. So, and yeah, maybe they can be guided by books, by mentors, by friends, right? Like to give them a general structure. The danger is like going down a rabbit hole. Yeah, and going into AI psychosis, right?

And well, AI psychosis was one thing, as I mentioned, but you would be surprised how many people don't read books anymore or just don't read. My number one advice to anyone in college, learn how to speed read.

Speed read, huh? That's interesting. Um, I mean, I've been one of these guys that have read and listened to less audiobooks less, but That's because I read like what, thousands of books and audiobooks before that. And that's because I merged to Wikipedia, right? Like Wikipedia is a better rabbit hole. Authors are biased also. I also can prompt AIs to guide me towards books that are worth my time nowadays. I'm back on a 20% book diet, right? And audiobooks, right? So I get what you're saying. But books, I mean, books, yeah, they force you to sit down and read.

Articles. Diagram, like you're not going to get a diagram shown to you inside an audiobook. Like I constantly ingest a lot of like catered to me newsletters, information that's not just in the form of like text, but also diagrams. There's some separation. Like instead of just having AI summarize it, I might like, you know, if I'm evaluating, let's say 10 different databases, I'm going to go ask it to launch all of them and build a benchmark around them and then evaluate the results of the benchmark. Rather than just have it like spit back to me like something that would take me, I know, 20-30 seconds to read per database.

Yeah, I love it, dude. Yeah, thanks for showing up again, Mark. Always love talking with you. What's the best way to find out more about you?

I launched my blog, so I'm gonna— I'll send you a link in the chat. And then Decent website. I'm probably gonna start posting a tiny bit more LinkedIn content, and then I got About I think ten fifteen different essays that I've been working on the last couple months. I'm about to release, so there's a blog reflection on college. I think you'll find fun.

There you go, dude. I love it. And yeah, let me just read out the blog out loud before we go. But it's mevgenev.com. So M for Mark, Evgenyev last name dot com was Mark and Charles.